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With a blend of vivid storytelling, humorous anecdotes, vulnerable sharing, and practical wisdom, Stephen Miller prompted me to reflect on my own life and the many ‘present moments’ God has given each of us to treasure.”
—Marshall Shelley, vice president, Christianity Today, Inc.

Value now. A refreshing reminder to value the now.”
—Evelyn Bence, author of Prayers for Girlfriends and Sisters and Me

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Present Moments

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ARE YOU SO BUSY with to-do lists that you’re missing the very moments you know you should be cherishing most of all?

That moment God gave you to cheer your son at bat. Or to praise your daughter at a recital for the music she has brought into your life. Or to sit in silence with a dying friend who needs to know that someone still cares—now more than ever.

Steve shows you how to embrace these fleeing moments before they slip away.

From our childhood to our senior days, there are moments like these that we want to embrace—and loved ones who need us to embrace those moments.

Chapter 1

The Moment of Discovery

We were born only yesterday (Job 8:9).

A MOST UNLIKELY SCENE changed the way I’ve been living my life. And the person with the starring role never knew she had done a thing.

I was in my garage, wiping wax off the family Ford. My two children had helped me apply the wax, probably because it looked like a messy job. I rewarded them with Popsicles; Bradley, then age four, took his and meandered off to play. Rebecca, almost seven, stayed behind. As I buffed the car with an old towel, I glanced over at her sitting on a toy four-wheeler parked about six feet away. She was in a bit of a daze, perhaps day-dreaming or recovering from her work on this warm spring afternoon.

I had nothing to do with the thought that came to me then. It felt like a mental invasion, an awareness poured into me by someone else.

She’s nearly halfway gone from your home.

I stopped mid-stroke, frozen in that instant of awareness.

When painful emotion grips me, it usually does so by the throat, choking into a whisper any words I try to speak. I said, “Rebecca, I love you.” But she didn’t hear me, and was quickly on her way.

Barring tragedy, I would have her in my daily life another ten years or so. But if those years pass as quickly as the previous ones, my daughter would be gone in a moment. For it was just a moment ago that I met her acquaintance in a Kansas hospital delivery room, taught her how to ride a bike, and chauffeured her to her first day of kindergarten—while her mom sat beside me and cried.

Life Before the Discovery
I remember when life never seemed to change much.

I can still picture myself, a gangling squirt of a kid, laying on Grandma Miller’s porch swing. Grandpa had built the swing in his tiny blacksmith shop near the barn. But I thought of it as Grandma’s swing because it was she who made it such a delightful place to rest. She had sewn for it a billowy, inch-thick cushion that she placed on the seat each morning and removed each evening.

In this memory I lay in the shape of a comma, with my head lying on the left arm rest, my back on the cushion, and my feet propped against the string of chain that was shaped like an upside down Y that rose from the right arm rest and gripped a hook in the ceiling. Gently I pumped the legs of the Y with my feet, nudging the swing left and right instead of forward and backward. From this swaying perch on a rounded hilltop in West Virginia, my eyes traced the half-mile dirt driveway that dipped into the small valley (which we called “the holler”) and then swooped back up a gently sloping hill where my grandparents’ only cow and horse grazed near the 1-lane gravel road just beyond the farm. Beyond the hill and the dusty road, and above the treetops bowing to the wind, purple ridges of the Appalachian mountains rose like spikes on a dinosaur’s back.

It was a beautiful scene I had enjoyed all of my life.

I never consciously thought, “This will be forever.” I just never realized it would one day end.

Every summer and many weekends throughout the year, Dad and Mom would bring our family here, from our Ohio home 200 miles away. My 2 brothers, 2 sisters, and I would jump in the hayloft whenever we pleased. In the early morning, when dew soaks the shoes of children, I would follow Grandpa into the musty, wooded valley to check his box rabbit traps. Between meals I would eat Grandma’s pumpkin pie, made from pumpkins she grew. Sometimes I would sit on the porch with her, snapping and stringing green beans in the afternoon shade. When my family’s summer vacation merged with those of aunts and uncles, I got to play with cousins I never saw but there. Francis and Guy, near my own age, were among my favorites.

Grandpa died late one October.

Grandma sold the farm and moved to Alabama with her daughter’s family. I never saw Francis or Guy again. Grandma often wrote me, but I saw her only a couple of times in the decade longer that she lived. The people who bought the farm tore down the porch and pounded “No Trespassing” signs into the hilltop along the fence line.

You’ve probably had shattering experiences like this, when happy reality disintegrates. If you’re like me, it didn’t make much difference in the way you lived afterward. You still took for granted the cherished people and circumstances remaining in your life. You treated them no differently than before. You just learned to live with the uneasy awareness that the scenery could change.

I find it strange that God didn’t use a crisis or a traumatic twist of fate to convince me life is fleeting—”swifter than a weaver’s shuttle” and “but a breath,” as the ailing and reflective Job put it. Nor was the discovery brought on by the dawning of a new stage in my life. It didn’t arrive, for example, when I started working part-time to save money for college, and suddenly found myself home alone at vacation time.

I did realize, with sadness, that my vacations with Dad and Mom and my brothers and sisters were over. No more camping in the Florida Keys, or chasing watermelons that escaped from the tiny rock harbor we built on the banks of a Colorado mountain stream. This end to my family vacations didn’t make me noticeably more aware of the swiftness of life. Perhaps it became a tiny step toward the discovery. But I didn’t begin treating my family, friends, job, or school as though they were treasures I’d one day have to leave behind. It didn’t occur to me to embrace and enjoy them while they were still within my reach. They were part of the changing scenery, but my eyes were fixed on the road ahead. I had no time to dwell on the here and now. I was headed for the then and there.

To deliver his message, God chose a little girl who said nothing.

Physical Time Isn’t Like Spiritual Time
Only after I realized how soon my daughter would be gone from my daily life did I begin to understand what Peter meant when he wrote, “With the Lord . . . a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). I used to read that verse and think, Come on. Anyone with a snapping synapse could see through this attempt to explain away the apostles’ earlier teaching that Jesus would return soon. After 30 years or more of no-show, you redefine “soon.”

But the fact is, there are 2 ways to measure time.

In physical time, measured by the calendar, Rebecca’s goodbye in 10 years could seem so far down the pike that I figure I have all the time in the world to play with her, teach her, and show her how important she is to me. I might even begin to think of her as a burden parked on my shoulders and growing heavier with each McDonald’s Happy Meal. Instead of cherishing our time together, I could actually start thinking of her as a cross I have to bear.

In soul time, the fleeting sense of which we experience only in hindsight, Rebecca’s goodbye is as near as my next breath. “Life,” says the Psalmist, agreeing with Job, “is but a breath” (39:5). One of Job’s counselors adds that we were born yesterday (8:9).

There’s nothing distorted or artificially compressed about spiritual time, experienced in the backward look. It’s real. Ask folks who have lived long enough to look back on their memories of decades ago. Does it seem like years? Or does it seem like moments?

To Dr. Mary Scott, a missionary friend of mine who died recently at age 87, her internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp more than 50 calendar years ago was not a distant recollection. When she spoke of it, she wept. The memory was fresh, the detail vivid, the emotion fully preserved.

To Dr. Ralph Earle, chairman of the committee of scholars that translated the New International Version of the Bible, his marriage to Mabel seemed like a recent event. Yet their white hair, weathered skin, and trembling hands confirmed that according to calendar time, they had been married 63 years. They attended the same church I did, and I rarely saw one without the other. After Mabel died on March 15, 1995, Ralph followed 2 months later. Without Mabel, perhaps Ralph experienced the other half of Peter’s phrase about spiritual time: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years.” In time measured by the soul, one sad day can seem that long.

Though the calendar years pile up, soul time seems absolutely unaffected and unconnected to this physical measurement. Wilfrid Sheed, an author in his late 60s and a survivor of polio and cancer, observed, “No one ever told me how little you change inside. One’s 12-year-old self and one’s present self feel exactly the same.”

I know what he means. A few nights ago I tucked my children in bed, after a couple rounds of wrestling them on the living room floor. From beneath the covers Rebecca looked up at me and asked, “Daddy, why do you play so much?”

“Because,” I said, “I’m just a little boy in a grown man’s body.”

She chuckled, certain I was kidding.

I wasn’t.

My childhood ended almost 30 calendar years ago. But in the heart and memory of my soul, my childhood seems like a few seconds ago. Nevertheless, my childhood is gone. I can no longer climb King Kong rock with my little brother and swing from the steel cable that dangled from the stout limb of an adjacent monster tree. The rock and tree disappeared when the Rolling Acres Mall arrived. And my little brother is bigger than me.

Yet the nearness of those days is more authentic than the stack of calendars conveys.

How the Discovery Changes Us
When we discover how fleeting life is—when the reality plunges its roots deep into our mind and our emotion—we become new creatures. We start seeing things differently. Our attitudes change, and so do our actions.

Once, for example, my 8-year-old son and I were standing along the inside wall of the school gymnasium, watching his sister and her classmates serenade a packed house of video-recording parents. Bradley couldn’t see his former teacher playing the piano, so without asking his permission I reached down to pick him up. Early in his life I had trained him to help out my aging back by jumping to the rhythm of my lift. And he always jumped. Until this moment.

I was standing behind him and to his right, with my hands positioned as arches cradled beneath his armpits. I sent the message to jump by pulling slightly downward, as though tensing a spring. But the instant we had liftoff, I could tell that not all rockets were firing. His arms hung limp at his side and his weight was that of a dead astronaut. He wasn’t helping at all. I, however, was committed to the lift partly because I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the folks standing near me.

When I returned him to the hardwood floor and leaned over to ask him if he saw the teacher, all he said was, “That was embarrassing.”

I apologized, then stood silently beside him with my hand on his shoulder.

Immediately I realized what his words and body language had told me. A year earlier he had used both of these to ask me to stop kissing him goodbye in front of his schoolmates. And now, he was telling me that my time for lifting him in public was over. Too soon he will not want me putting my arm around him when others are watching. So I will cherish my hand on his shoulder for as long as he lets me rest it there.

That’s how the discovery changes us. We realize that there are moments of opportunity that will come and go in the blink of an eye. And we embrace what we would otherwise overlook, delay, or push aside.

We arrive from work to a home littered with marbles, dolls, and coloring books and the children playing vigorously, recognizing that this is our messy moment when a neat house is less important than a fun house. Someday the clutter will be gone, we remind ourself, but so will the children.

We find a private moment with our own dad to stumble and fumble yet somehow deliver the feelings we’ve long held but never expressed in words: “I love you, Dad.” And as his eyes fill, ours do the same.

We find patience for temperamental kin who come for the holidays, because we realize that this is one of our few moments together and that differences need not consume our moment.

Moving Past Our Regrets
Once we discover how quickly life is passing, we not only begin to cherish the fleeting moments as they come, we begin to regret those that got away.

There is a herd of social psychologists who specialize in studying regret; they conduct ongoing research to find out what we humans regret most and how we cope with those regrets. I’ve talked with half a dozen of these specialists and I’ve learned that if they could sit down with each one of us and talk as friend to friend, they’d make sure we understood at least 2 things.

Regret Is Good
If we regret something, like hurting our family, that means we care enough to be sorry. The trouble is that people in our culture—though not in every culture—hate negative emotions. So instead of thinking about our regrets and lingering with them long enough to learn from them, we bury them, ignore them, or deny they ever existed. We say we have no regrets—at least none worth mentioning.

Janet Landman, Ph.D., a Babson College professor of psychology told me, “I can’t imagine anyone living into adulthood and not making a mistake that they care about. If you make a mistake and you care about it, then regret is the emotional consequence.”

Regret is good in the same way that physical pain is good. It’s a warning. It’s a clue that something is wrong and we’d better look into it.

A 64-year-old grandmother in Dallas told me, however, “Regret is a waste of time. Dwelling on the past limits your future.” Reseachers disagree. They say the opposite is true.

 Landman, for instance, told me of a woman in her 60s who couldn’t acknowledge regret. “This woman lived her entire adult life with an abusive husband,” Landman said. “She can’t leave the house without his permission. She has to beg him for every penny. She’s not allowed to eat out, but he eats out whenever he wants to. It would be hard for her to say, ‘I made a huge mistake, and because of it most of my life has been miserable.’ But if she could, her next 20 years might not be that way, even if her previous 40 are ruined.”

Studies show that we can reduce our regrets in the future by remembering our regrets in the past. Part of the reason for this is because regret is an emotion that prods us to act. It pesters us to apologize and to make things right. And it warns us of similar problems ahead.

One big reason some folks do nothing about past mistakes is because they’re ashamed. Regret mobilizes, but shame paralyzes. Shame makes us want to drop into a hole or turn invisible.

I have a friend whose husband recently left her and their 5 kids (ages 3-14). The woman suspected he was having an affair, so she followed him when he went on an errand one day. When he pulled into a hotel parking lot, she did too. There, she confronted him. He angrily admitted that he was having sex with a married coworker. Furthermore, he said he was moving out immediately.

In the months that followed, he had nearly zero contact with his children. He didn’t even show up for the Christmas holidays.

I guess it’s possible that he simply doesn’t care about them, and because of that he does not regret the pain they’re suffering. But perhaps he feels ashamed about what he has done, and he’s hiding.

Bank robber Katherine Ann Power hid for 23 years before regret managed to overcome her sense of shame. She was a Brandeis University senior and part of an anti-Vietnam War group that tried to launch a revolution to stop what she felt was an unjust war. To fund the revolution, the group decided to “liberate” money from “the establishment” that condoned the war. Power drove the switch car the day they robbed a bank outside of Boston. She said she learned several hours after the robbery—to her horror—that one of the gunmen had shot and killed a police officer. The policeman had 9 children. Power moved across the continent, to Oregon, took on a new identity, married, raised a family, became a restaurant consultant and cooking teacher, and volunteered her time for charitable causes—all the while remaining on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” list longer than any other woman in history. On the day she turned herself in, September 15, 1993, she pleaded guilty to manslaughter—though the district attorney said that without her guilty plea he would not have had enough evidence to convict her. Three weeks later she was sentenced to 8 years in prison and 20 years probation. She served 6 years—released early for good behavior.

Regret is good not only because it pushes us to do the right thing, it preserves our integrity and decency. If we care enough to regret, that means we’re holding fast to our highest values, in spite of our stumbling. We may have hurt someone, but if we regret it, we still value them.

Let Go of Regrets You Can’t Undo
This is the second piece of advice the psychologist researchers would offer us. Go ahead and identify the biggest regrets in your life, they’d say. Spend time thinking about them, make restitution if you can, and promise yourself not to make the same mistakes again. But don’t beat yourself up over something you can’t change.

Tom Gilovich, Ph.D., social psychologist at Cornell University, says people need to realize that as the years go by, regret has a way of growing—instead of diminishing. This is especially true of regrets over missed opportunities. He says warped hindsight is partly to blame.

“When people look back on what they should have done,” says Gilovich, “they’re looking through rose-colored glasses and misrepresenting the probabilities of success.” If people could realize how common this is, he said, they’d more easily let go of these regrets.

Cherishing the Present Moment
The time spent with our regrets—before releasing them into the redeeming hands of God—is time well invested. It’s one thing to know in our brain that the present moment is already slipping through our fingers. It’s another to know it in our heart because we’ve felt the pain of a moment missed.

I regret working as much as I did as a teenager. Nearly every week night after school and each weekend I pumped gas at a filling station to pay for my clunky set of wheels and to save for college. I missed my moment to concentrate on my studies and to enjoy after-school sports and clubs. I settled for a bunch of B’s, a few A’s, and one measly season of track during junior high. That regret, known in my brain and felt in my heart, is affecting the way I’m raising my kids.

As I write this, Bradley has discovered karate (and is quite capable of inflicting wrenching spasms on my solar plexus). He’s also finishing his third season of baseball, and is anticipating his seventh season of soccer and his third season of basketball. Rebecca is now making pleasing sounds on the piano (after all those lessons), and she’s been through 3 seasons of basketball, which she hopes has given her enough experience to earn her a spot on the girls’ eighth-grade basketball team. She’s also planning to give volleyball a try.

This is their moment to experiment with hobbies, skills, and more fun than you can shake a stick at. And it’s my moment to help them.

I could have heard this in a parenting seminar, believed it in my head, and failed to act on it because I assigned it a low priority. Instead, I discovered it by lingering with my regrets. Then I experienced it in my heart, and assigned it a priority worthy of my time. I don’t know what kind of dividends it will pay, other than the shelf of trophies we already have, and the shirts I got for serving as assistant soccer and baseball coaches. But if one of the studies at Cornell University is correct, it won’t pay off in regrets. Not one person expressed regret over a hobby they learned—even if they had long since abandoned it. The new skill left them with an enduring sense of accomplishment.

“There is a time for everything,” says the sage of Ecclesiastes, “and a season for every activity under heaven” (3:1).

There is a time to embrace and a time to push aside, he says. Unfortunately he doesn’t say when to do which.

One great clue lies in the discovery that life is but a moment, in time measured by the spirit. Once we realize this, we begin to embrace the people and the opportunities that only briefly pass our way. And we try to help others do the same.

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Copyright 1999 by Stephen M. Miller. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, reprint, or to order the book on CD, contact: StephenMillerBooks.com.

Published by Vine Books, an imprint of Servant Publications. IBSN 1-56955-055-7.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.